The Trump administration is moving to rescind two key Biden-era rules finalized by the Bureau of Land Management last year that advanced protections for millions of acres across the West and Alaska’s North Slope.
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs posted a notice Tuesday that BLM’s signature public lands rule, which was implemented in June, is under formal review and has been marked for possible “rescission.”
OIRA, which is part of the White House Office of Management and Budget, also posted Tuesday it is reviewing a BLM rule implemented last year that restricts oil and gas development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A).
Both notices indicate the review involves BLM developing proposed rules to rescind the two Biden-era policies. An Interior Department spokesperson said in a brief emailed statement to POLITICO’s E&E News that, in accordance with orders issued in February by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to increase energy development on public lands, “the BLM will pursue rescinding both rules.”
The rescission of both rules would affect the management of millions of acres of public lands. The conservation and landscape health rule includes measures to place conservation and restoration on par with oil and gas drilling, mining and other uses across 245 million acres overseen by BLM; the NPR-A rule restricted oil and gas development within the 23-million-acre reserve in Alaska’s North Slope.
The timeline for completing the reviews and rules rescission isn’t clear. Nor is it known whether there will be opportunities for public review and comment.
A White House spokesperson referred questions about the OIRA review notices to the Interior Department, which did not address the timeline for rescinding the rules in its emailed statement. OMB representatives didn’t respond to a request for information.
The OIRA reviews are not surprising, given that congressional Republicans have made several attempts to revoke the public lands rule. What’s more, both President Donald Trump and Burgum have publicly discussed plans to ramp up development of oil and gas and other mineral resources across Alaska.
Burgum may have telegraphed the NPR-A rule review last week when he told Interior employees during an “All Hands Meeting” that restricting oil and gas development there makes no sense, noting it serves as the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve.
He also mocked the controversy over BLM’s approval in 2023 of ConocoPhillips’ Willow drilling project inside the NPR-A.
“This is not a national wildlife refuge, it’s the national strategic petroleum reserve,” Burgum told employees. “We have a bunch of resources on the North Slope, it was designated, and then somehow we decided we can’t even produce energy in a national strategic petroleum reserve.”
The reviews come a little more than two months after Burgum issued a series of orders on Feb. 3 that the department said were part of a broader effort to unleash the full energy potential of public lands in Alaska and across the West.
The orders include “Unleashing American Energy,” which set the stage for the Trump administration to significantly revise the sweeping public lands rule. In that order, Burgum directed Interior’s assistant secretaries to suggest “steps that, as appropriate, will be taken to suspend, revise, or rescind” a list of rules and orders, including the public lands and NPR-A rules.
A separate secretarial order — which mirrored an executive order signed by Trump in January — called for greater mineral resource development in Alaska. It reinstated a mandate from Trump’s first term to rewrite the land and energy management plan for the NPR-A.
The Biden-era NPR-A rule imposed “maximum protections” for oil development on roughly 13 million acres of protected lands within the 23-million-acre reserve.
Among other things, the plan requires companies to offset “reasonably foreseeable and significantly adverse effects” of drilling proposals. It also calls for allowing BLM to regularly update boundaries of “special areas,” which are regions where oil and gas development is most restricted.
Critics blasted the rule, saying it would kill oil and gas development in the NPR-A, where the U.S. Geological Survey has estimated there’s as much as 8.7 billion barrels of oil and 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
An American Petroleum Institute spokesperson declined Tuesday to comment on the OIRA notices but pointed to an API policy priority memorandum in December asking the Interior Department, among other things, to repeal the NPR-A and the public lands rules.
API’s “5 Point Policy Roadmap” last year also called for revoking the public lands rule, grouping it among “a recent series of rules” that it said impede energy development on federal lands.
“All of these rules should be swiftly repealed,” the road map said.
Industry’s game plan
The administration appears to be following the industry’s lead, critics say.
Alison Flint, senior legal director at the Wilderness Society, said the fact that the Trump administration has placed both rules “on the regulatory agenda for rescission” marks “the most concrete sign yet that they intend to scrap these commonsense and widely supported policies.”
Flint noted a presidential memorandum Trump issued last week to agency heads government-wide that involved identifying “unlawful and potentially unlawful regulations,” and then taking steps “to effectuate the repeal of any regulation, or the portion of any regulation, that clearly exceeds the agency’s statutory authority or is otherwise unlawful.”
The memo says this can be done “without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the ‘good cause’ exception in the Administrative Procedure Act” that allows agencies “to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be ‘impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.’”
As a result, Flint said, it remains to be seen whether the White House and Interior will adhere to the “lawful process of engaging the public through notice and comment or attempt to simply make the rules go poof pursuant to last week’s” presidential memo.
Scott Streater can be reached on Signal at s_streater.80.
